After searching for ages I found out that MySQL's boolean mode breaks if you search against an INT field. I had added the slide_id field to the search in order to find stuff by slide_id (obviously) as it's the only *guaranteed* unique value (sometimes there are duplicate accession ID's).

I'd rather have boolean mode working, so I've removed slide_id from the generated SQL. Michael J says he thinks I might be able to cast the slide_id as a varchar at create view time. Just started by doing this: http://www.google.ca/search?q=mysql+to_char